The memory in my head is full. I spend all my time thinking, thinking thinking. No one hears it. I don't talk to anyone.
I want to read, but my memory is full. When I read, I find myself wanting to talk instead, get MY thoughts out.
Not that my thoughts can contend with the geniuses and visionaries of the world, (maybe they can, but it's unproven),
but I can't absorb anything without first offloading the stuff in my head. That's what this is. One big document.
Essentially a diary, but I only write down things that I've thought multiple times in essentially the same words.
That's a pretty good sign I should write it down.
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: I don't read books. A lot of the stuff I write is therefore redundant. You may read and think to yourself,
"this is literally just [insert author name here]". It probably is. But like I said, I can't read before getting this stuff out.
I don't like equating IQ and intelligence. IQ is a somewhat effective benchmark of one's top intelligence, the performance your brain reaches when pushed to its limit. This is your "maximum intelligence", how smart you are when you are trying your hardest. However, I've noticed that many intelligent people don't use their intellect in everyday life. I'm not saying that your brain should run at 100% capacity 24/7, I'm moreso talking about the acceptable accuracy of conclusions reached by the individual. I believe that if you are intelligent, you should try harder than the average person to reach correct and logically sound conclusions, for example regarding your personal life philosophy or what societal rules you would like to impose. You should try harder than anyone to prove yourself wrong, which is a behavior I find is lacking in a lot of people, even intelligent ones. A person who is intelligent when trying, but doesn't try, is effectively not intelligent. This is the reason I called an IQ test a somewhat effective benchmark for intelligence, as I believe a true gauge of intelligence should require about a week of time spent with a person, analyzing their thought processes, how fast they are, how many options they explore, and what results they are content with.
⚠️DISCLAIMER: I'm aware this is redundant and level 1 anti-capitalist rhetoric. I just wanted to get it down.
Conflating profit and service quality is capitalism's central flaw. It is true that a better service generates more profit,
but when your service is optimal, how do you generate more profit? By charging more for less.
But when your service is optimal, why generate more profit to begin with? The reason is the central actor
without which this problem cannot arise - the owner, the investor, the suit, the soul sucking leech, the lizard man,
whatever you wanna call him. Without him, a business owner will never jeopardize his services to squeeze out a couple more cents,
because he has no reason to. The lizard man demands infinite growth, and is discontent with an optimal service, as oxymoronic as that may sound.
But why is the suit so central to this? Can't a greedy business owner work just as well? (I can only explain this next part by going a little batshit)
A business owner, a human, in addition to having some idea about the business in question other than just having money on his mind, has the ability to backpedal, to learn from his attempted greed, to realise that an optimal service provides more long-term
profit than any amount of penny-squeezing. The suit lacks this ability. For some reason I can't explain, suits don't behave like humans do.
It's as if they don't know how humans think and feel, and what we want. Think of how many massive apps and services that absolutely no one wanted, or uses.
Those ideas all sounded fantastic in the boardroom, went through long phases of drafting, programming, design, testing, QA and whatever else, not
to mention the amounts of money spent to pay all those people, just to end up completely unwanted. Who the hell wants YouTube comments summarized by topic?
Why does my iPhone give me preset responses to texts from my friends, as if I don't have the necessary brain power to say "see you there" when my friend
texts me that he's on his way? Who are these people coming up with these ideas? I feel like a really bad prank is being pulled on me any time I get an app update.
In my opinion, removing these people from the equation will set in motion a return to optimal services running without infinite growth in mind,
while also hindering the trickle-up effect of hypercapitalism, but what the hell do I know about how money flows.
If I can't be one of the special people I don't want to be anything at all
A continuous variable is a variable such that there are possible values between any two values.
In contrast, a categorical variable can take on one of a number of fixed values. Think of nationalities for example - there's nothing between French and Chinese.
A central task of the human mind is to turn continuous variables into categorical ones using thresholds and decision boundaries.
When we fill up a cup of water, for example, there's a "too little", "enough", and "too much". The brain has to use its own judgment
to define sensible thresholds on the continuous variable of "cup fullness" to be able to reason. If we didn't do this, we would be overloaded,
as we would have unique behavior for each possible fullness of the cup.
You may be thinking "what is the point of this paragraph, everyone knows this", but I'd beg to differ. Realising this about life and applying it
to almost every problem I face is probably the most important discovery I've ever made, and it's a behavior I don't see reflected a lot in other people.
A dizzying amount of fallacies I see people make boils down to them misinterpreting a continuous variable as being physically categorical,
neglecting their mind's role as the judge and failing to reflect on their own decision boundaries, and challenging their validity. I'll provide a more concrete example.
One argument that I have not seen calm down on the internet for years concerns which jokes are acceptable and which aren't, when a joke is funny,
and when it's insensitive and rude. I think most people can agree that sometimes, a joke is too cruel to be considered funny. But in isolation,
when person A makes a joke and person B is offended, we do not know who is at fault. One of two statements has to be true: either A is too insensitive,
or B is too sensitive. But when I observe these arguments, both sides seem to neglect this fact. They each argue their position as if their threshold is
objective truth, as if their decision boundary is correct and the other person's isn't. I say this as if they're aware of these thresholds to begin with,
which they often aren't. Instead, it is argued as if the nature of the joke is categorical, it is either funny or insensitive, and perception plays no role.
Now, I'm not saying that the persons must agree on an exact threshold to get along, often times people can disagree if they can reasonably and non-confrontationally argue
their respective positions. Furthermore, I don't believe that recognising the mind's role in categorizing continuous variables gives every single threshold merit.
I believe jokes can be too cruel, but I'm challenged and fascinated by the difficulty to objectively and sensibly categorize them as such.
I've been noticing a disturbing lack of original artstyles in indie games. I observed 3 main categories:
I want to make it clear that I'm not against taking inspiration. Nothing is wholy original, we're all just synthesizing new things from old things. But dear God, please sit and think for a second what you actually want your game to look like, because you'll stand out that much more with your own style than some generic one or a lifted one. I'd rather take the most butt ugly programmer art than another nostalgia-slop nothingburger.
I was watching a video on a FNaF mod called FNaF in Real Time, which was the target of widespread ridicule and harassment because people thought it was bad.
It didn't do anything particularly upsetting, people just thought it sucked and was cringe. And the creator received death threats and pictures of dead rape victims as a result.
I realized then that I would most likely be the result of similar treatment, if not worse. Waderverse is going to tackle a lot of heavy topics, often in a very intimate way.
I will try not to be gratuitous, as I do not want to use any of these themes for shock value, but I also don't want to treat them with the safe distance that
many works do, because I believe it undermines their gravity. I believe many will understand and resonate with this, but there will undoubtedly be a group of people who won't.
I'm okay with that, but among those people, there will be a mob that sees this as utterly unacceptable, and the resulting treatment will be cruel and unrelenting.
Controversial works have always been the target of hounding, but something has changed in the age of social media. It's just Twitter, really.
There's people on Twitter, and then there's Twitter people. I can't exactly detail a psychological profile right now, so I won't digress now
and instead save it for another paragraph. Anyways, it amazes me that we live in an age where complaining about death threats will often
be met with the suggestion to "grow thicker skin", showcasing a gradual desensitization of society towards awful and cruel behavior. I know I'll survive it,
but I really wish it wasn't the case. I'm ready to accept any form of ridicule, disdain and even hate towards my work, but I believe this sentiment of "I want you to die"
towards creators of hated media is something new. I hope to weather the storm that's coming, because ultimately and sincerely, I do not wish to upset anyone with my work, unlike some.
I do not want to merely shock and disgust while smugly smiling and saying "Triggered?" under the guise of challenging societal ideals, while really just being a total dickhead.
Instead, I believe that many things happening today are gross, repulsive, abhorrent, disturbing, and many other nasty adjectives, and I want to bring them forward in an unapologetic and neutral light,
without subjective framing or opinion, but with faithful and respectful reproduction. I don't want to shy away from anything for the sake of comfort and psychological safety.
I hope that I can channel enough artistic prowess to land this in a satisfactory manner, instead of faceplanting and pushing out half-baked grotesque gross shock-bait.
I have TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome), a condition where the brain represses uncomfortable stimuli and "offloads" them to physical pain, usually in the back,
but more precisely in the lower back in my case. Sounds made up, I know, but decades of research have gone into it, and I've finally started to see the first inklings of pain relief
in years after beginning to read the book on it, "Healing Back Pain" by Dr. John E. Sarno.
Anyways, it made me reflect on what behavior I could be repressing that's building up enough to cause physical pain, and I think I've got it: I'm cripplingly socially aware.
I'm not talking about social anxiety, or maybe I am, I don't know how one would draw the line, but I'll try my best to explain what I mean.
At any given moment, I am aware of what actions will cause positive and negative outcomes; What will irritate someone, what will weird them out or annoy them,
what will score me points with them, et cetera. So is everybody, right? Well, I'm observing that most people are to a lesser degree. They make more mistakes,
they slip up, they run into people, they let their mind wander in public. They're generally a lot less calculated in their external behavior, foregoing
prediction of possible outcomes beyond a certain threshold. I'm a lot stricter with myself, I don't let myself make mistakes, because if I can avoid them, why should I make them?
That made me think: why do I try so hard? No one else is trying this hard. Other people are annoying, irritating, and weird at times.
Why am I not allowed that luxury? Most people would say something like: you can't make everyone like you, but my issue is that I can, and I know exactly how.
I know what actions will make people like me, how to solve conflicts, how to change people's perception of me and solve misconceptions, and when it is ultimately impossible.
I feel like I'm playing chess in a terrible position, having to waste minutes of time calculating every move, when I really just wanna ram my bishop into a pawn,
but I know I'll lose him the next turn, and I will have lost the trade, but it would feel really, really good to do it. But at the same time, to continue the metaphor,
I prefer people that play intelligently, that move their pieces with foresight and care; people that try.
I was on the train the other day, and this woman walks in and sits down. She's obviously severely mentally ill and delirious, talking to herself, saying things
involuntarily that her brain is randomly accessing from memory, such as "don't forget about the rent!", or "her birthday is tomorrow!", in between fits of snickering.
Her volume ranged from softly talking to yelling.
While I was mildly irritated, I felt another emotion much more prominently: jealousy. I was jealous that this woman gets the privilege of being herself.
She doesn't care about losing pieces, she doesn't even see the chessboard. I wanted to be in her position, yelling about whatever I want, following every impulse,
not a single milisecond of foresight behind any action. I wanted to make everyone on the train unwilling participants, throwing the chessboard on the floor entirely,
while punishing myself even more than them with embarassment, for letting myself get into this position in the first place.
This is not my first instance of becoming aware of brain processes I can't turn off, so I'm not worried about being unable to find a solution, though I can't see it yet.
I think I'll start yelling at people and see how that works.
The cattle are the central group holding back an equilibrated sensible society. Cattle are easy to provoke, get angry, and rile up against something by actors good and bad.
As long as there's cattle, there will be those willing to take advantage to steer society in their direction.
I've thought long about the concept of "re-education", as it's the first thing people bring up when talking about uneducated masses. However, I believe that a person who can be easily educated can
just as easily be re-educated toward any number of ideologies, good or bad. The question arises, how does one engineer a truly reasonable thinker?
Which negative qualities can be done away with, and which are intrinsically embedded in a person's psyche?
Life has been going better ever since I started untying and tying my shoes each time instead of ramming my feet into tied shoes.
An axiom is a statement that is assumed to be true. Grass is green is an axiom, because although we will never be able to determine the true nature of grass,
or of anything, it's a lot simpler to assume that grass is green and go from there.
There's something I like to call the societal axiom. It definitely has an established name in sociology, but since I don't read, that's what I call it.
A societal axiom is a statement that is societally agreed upon to be true. Racism is bad is a good example. Great people before us did the reasoning, the activism
and the fighting to verify and establish this fact, and we are currently enjoying the fruits of their labor - we live in a society where racism is frowned upon.
However, something happens when societal axioms are established for a long time and not sufficiently taught or challenged - their reasoning begins to erode.
Most people today - at least the surface dwellers - believe that racism is bad, but they don't have a reason to. They exploit the fact that the societal axiom
is universally agreed upon and goes largely unchallenged to avoid having to go down a complex line of thinking, weighing the pros and cons, to come out with a more
airtight belief. When confronted with a racist, they do not engage them in a debate, they simply state "you're racist", using the established axiom to claim victory,
knowing that they are societally correct, and the racist does not have the luxury to voice his opinion without heavy scrutiny. This strategy is effective in the short term,
but a society that is not sufficiently educated on the precise reasoning behind its beliefs gives rise to its very opposition. A silenced racist is still a racist, and a problem,
and this goes doubly for a disenfranchised, resentful racist. I'm not advocating for a society in which racism may be openly voiced without backlash. I am merely stating that
society's current strategy of dealing with undesirable viewpoints is ineffective. Believe me, I'm more than familiar with the headache of facing a racist.
For how cerebral and demanding of a game Counter Strike is, the playerbase tends to be severely emotionally and intellectually stunted.
I wanna talk about something I like to call the carnival bossfight.
I define a carnival bossfight as a bossfight
that makes the gaps in its offense very obvious. It's hard to define, so I'll give an example.
Say a boss shoots fireballs across a 2D screen. A carnival boss will do something like fire them in alternating fashion on the
top and bottom half of the screen, or two on each side, one in the middle - the main thing is that there's a predictable pattern.
This isn't bad boss design by itself. However, it does create a sense of dissonance when it comes to the seriousness of the bossfight.
It's like the boss is saying "let's see you dodge this!", right before leaning over and whispering "don't worry, I'll let you dodge".
Cuphead has carnival bossfights, and they work fantastically, because the game's tone isn't serious - some levels even take place on carnivals.
However, in a game like Hollow Knight, where I'm supposed to be deeply invested and immersed in the game's story, I find that the
bosses' predictable attack patterns take me out of it. I don't feel like I'm facing a vicious foe hellbent on destroying me, because he's not giving it his all.
Someone that truly wants you dead doesn't give you a chance to dodge. But if the player can't dodge, they die. Therefore, the challenge of the boss designer
becomes obscuring the gaps in the boss's offense to create the illusion of a vicious onslaught of attacks.
I deserve a cult of personality.
Last year, my aunt died. When someone dies, people often say how it's a reminder of their own mortality, that they too will one day die.
For me, it was a little different. It was a reminder that I can die alone, as my aunt did. People always say the same old "don't worry,
you'll find someone someday" to console their own and others' minds when such thoughts arise, and this was a reminder that that statement
isn't true in the slightest. Everyone knows that some people die alone, but everyone thinks that they don't fall into that category,
they tell themselves that people that die alone deserve it, that they must've done something to be undesirable to everyone they encountered.
My aunt wasn't like that. She wasn't an awful person, not insufferable, not unattractive, no one thing that would've sufficiently explained
dying alone of cancer at 60-something.
Anyone else would've brushed these thoughts aside, because why should I draw a parallel between me and her? Is dying alone hereditary?
While cleaning her apartment, I noticed she had all these books, all this art, all these CDs. She was clearly very passionate about
these things. I think what she really wanted was someone who would listen to her talk about these things for hours. But no one ever fell in
love with her. I see myself in that. I mean, here I am, literally writing a public diary in a desperate attempt at getting someone to listen to me talk.
I'm 23 writing this, but I see myself in the same position at 30, 40, 50, 60... . Getting lucky and finding the right person is not something
one can get good at. And as the years pass by, I find myself becoming more misanthropic, more intolerant, and less sociable. I don't know if it's too late,
but I fear that I'll eventually become too much to deal with. Desperation and loneliness are undesirable traits, and eventually they start slipping through the cracks
in ways you don't even intend, and it puts people off.
I don't have a non-rambly way to end this, so I'll just end it here.
At 23 years of age, my life is over.